- Rework Middlebury essay and send in the application ASAP!
- Get financial aid info (yikes) for them also, send that in ASAP
- Start thinking about what you're gonna write for their scholarship too!

- Think about research paper for your history class...

Please post pictures of your favorite short haircuts. I need a change.

I have no intention of growing it out. I just want a different style.

It's been in the same Breathless Jean Seaberg cut for months now.

Sento bath houses are out of control nice. toss a couple hundred yen and spend the next couple hours naked, with a bunch of other women, relaxing in a variety of hot, steamy baths. Cold hard chillin, Japanese style.

Ochazuke (green tea over rice), also BANGIN. Of course, no one can tell me how to make it from scratch, since everyone just buys these little packets of spice and seaweed and throws it into the mix.

Yahoo keitai (web/phone content provider) had Daft Punk's entire discography almost available for ringtones! I am not trying to spend money on this kinda thing, but it's too cool. Also, download Deathrow records wallpapers and ringtones, get Deeez Nuuuts for your phone! Hilarious, no?

Rotating sushi jawns are also totally exciting. 105 yen a plate. Eight bucks later, and I'm feeling great.

In regards to sushi and fish in general, autumn sanma, which is now in season, is delicious. It's tasty like I don't even know how to describe.

Also feeling: everything else. Ah, fond memories of this weekend. Rainy Sundays, lying in bed, and all that jazz. Oh right, and I saw Radiohead for FREE (thanks to another kid in my dorm house) this past Thursday. Pictures shall ensue!

Hey friends that make AMVs...

Peep this.



When I was a kid, my stepbrother and I would kill time sitting around and waiting for good videos to come on The Box. THE BOX remember that?!?! Channel 51, I think. Call in and order your favorite video for $2.50.

I always loved this song (which btw, Speed Racer is the original video for it). It would come on The Box every now and again, but it was rare, and so it was a treat to catch. The sound on this YouTube of it isn't that good, but it IS properly synched up like the original video. Maybe it was the first time I saw something like that. Amazing. Ghostface Killah yo.

Sometimes I can't tell whether I've been making sensible updates or not. I've been writing little notes and one-page letters to friends back in Philly, telling the story of the day and my personal thoughts on things and whatnot. And here on ole LJ I've been making sure to post lots of pictures. But man, I feel like I haven't made any solid updates in a bit. Does it really matter? Do the pictures tell enough for now? Have you figured out that there are more pictures on my flickr stream? Probably.

Do my good friends even check this shit? PLEASE! Leave a fucking comment Jenny, Alexis, Kerstin, Fred, etc etc etc ...

とにかく (anyway)、I am really feeling the Wax Poetics record rundown on East Village. This past couple of weeks have been killin it. KILLING it. Amazing study music. My new headphones are mostly for fashion, but they've also got preeeeetty good bass going on, so listening to music while thinking about Japanese grammar is extra nice. Also, Osaka homeboy Nori has me no-holds-barred throwing the Philly slang around (which is good for my health, I've decided), and the semblance of a regular hang-out sessions has me feeling a little more settled here. Kansai dialect is killer. I don't even know what they sound like up in Tokyo.

No job. School, dinner, sleep. Weekends getting acquainted with Osaka and Kyoto. Kyoto is out of control serene, if such a saying makes sense to you. I have no patience right now to describe things in detail, which I am sorry for because I feel like so many people write about Japan just in terms of names and places, with no description of what these places feel or smell like. Pictures can only do so much. I will have to spend some time with the notepad. It's really hard to be alone here, though - roommates and people you know are around every corner.

- I freaking love peeing in Japanese-style toilets. Love.

- I saw a Japanese Muslim woman on the train yesterday (just wearing a silk hijab). Wowwie!

- Went to a show last night in Namba. Acid Eaters yo. Acid Eaters... (also the three other bands we saw were amazing in crazy other ways. Eclectic show for sure.)

- Asahi Super Dry is a beer of choice, leagues better than the last Pabst I had (a king's age ago). I don't really think there are other beers though, really...

I had more things to comment on, but hell, I keep forgetting because I'm exhausted and at school.

Carry on!

The Wax Poetics podcast is out of control this week with the quiet storm jams. The songs near the end of the 2nd hour are directly vibing off of various slowjam mixes I made for friends a little while back.

Get it while it's hot.

Show for the week of September 18th, 2008.

Check the playlist:

Playlist for The Wax Poetics Record Rundown on 09.18.08
Artist	Track	Album	Label
Kool & the Gang	Summer Madness	45	DeLite
George Duke	Feel	Feel	MPS
Mellow Madness	Mellow Madness	A&M
The Whatnauts	I Can't Stand to See You Cry	45	GSF
Brief Encounter	I'm So Satisfied	45	Seventy Seven
Love Love Love	Anne Sexton	45	Seventy Seven
JR Bailey	Too Far Gone to Turn Around	45	Toy
Little Royal	Jealous	45	Trius
Sweet and Innocent	Express Your Love	45	Active
Edwynn Page	Are You Somebody's Girl	45	2 Hot Records
Conquest	Never Alone	45	Music Store
Frank E. Jeffrys Jr.	Plain and Simple	Plain and Simple	Shag
Venum	Heart to Heart	12"	Budweiser Showdown
The Isley Brothers	Don't Say Goodnight	Go All The Way	T Neck
Kevin McCord	Forever	12"	Presents
Errol Stubbs	Spaced Out On Your Love	45	EOR
Rick A. Webb and Raw Band	Til The End	12"	U.C.I. Records
Johnny Guitar Watson	Love Jones	Love Jones	DJM
Communicators and Black Experience Band	Has Time Really Changed	45	Tri Oak
Communicators and Black Experience Band	One Chance	45	Duplex
The Moments	Pray For Me	45	Wax Poetics
Aretha Franklin	Do Right Woman, Do Right Man	Aretha's Gold	Atlantic
D'Angelo	One Mo Gin	Voodoo	Virgin
Aaliyah	One in a Million	One in a Million	Atlantic
Ready For the World	Love You Down	12"	MCA
Art of Noise	Moments in Love	12"	Island
The System	Don't Disturb This Groove		Atlantic
Prince	If I Was Your Girlfriend	12"	Paisley Park
Sylvia Striplin	You Can't Turn Me Away	12"	Melodic
Delegation	The Promise of Love	12"	Shadybrook
Kaiya	Scandalous	12"	Sue International
Jimmy Dockett	Honey, That Strange and Funny Feeling	12"	Star Vision
Mad Lads	I Think I am Falling	Music For Lovers Only	Express
Don Blackman	Holding You Loving You	Blackman	GRP

Rules:

Take a picture of yourself right now.
Don't change your clothes, don't fix your hair...just take a picture.
Post that picture with NO editing.
Post these instructions with your picture.

(if you go through my July flickr set, the Wizard notebook makes a few appearances ...)

september 16th
I just have to add that I am in love with notebooks and stationery here. Brand new paper is absolutely gorgeous, especially with the 6.5 & 7mm line rule they have here. Pens and sleek books and letters all abound. The very site of them gives me pleasure.

september 17th
History class and outside the beautiful clouds in the open sky, a typhoon later in the week. It's Wednesday and I've eaten at school for the day for only 600円。I'll go home to my fluffy futons and tatami mat room in afternoon silence and maybe exercise before touching myself, or vice-versa. I am beginning to remember, the muscle memory, the exquisiteness of living alone in study and personal whimsy. At night I fall quietly to sleep with the thought of lithe muscles and warm skin. In class, work and play, I feel like a high-schooler. "You don't look 25." No, I don't. Do I think like I am?

Ah, I should mention ... the karaoke at Shoen Bowling in Makino had "Mr Roboto" and "Don't Stop Me Now," two songs I was unable to find back in the US ...

-end notebook.

Of course, once I am home I only make dinner and exercise, and sit feeling melancholy on my computer in the rainy evening. I want a bike to cruise with, that doesn't hurt my knees. Tomorrow I should see if they have high seat posts for sale somewhere ...

Osaka Castle! Total accident that I caught this on the video. Ignore my silver nail polish.

My homegirl Kerstin is one of many of the particle physicists working at CERN and the Large Hadron Collider. If you do not know what that is, do yourself a favor and look it up!

me: how's cern?
Kerstin: cern is exciting!
it's going!
i can't imagine what it feels like for some of the people who have been working on it for 20+ years
me: no shit. what has been going on exactly? like... are there now huge crazy things you all have to do and maintain? do you have to wear a lab coat?
Kerstin: hahaha
mostly i am in the control room. i work on the pixel detector, which is the innermost subdetector of ATLAS
it isn't really ready yet
it's the latest of all the subdetectors
so there is lots of work to do
then we are trying to get all the subdetectors to work together
like, with the same timing and data aquisition
at the same time, the accelerator beam people are trying to get the beams to be more stable, then to collide them, then to increase their energy
me: sheeeet
sounds awesome
like comic book awesome

- a fedora hat, finally! Not so many girls wear them where I've been treading. When Julian and I were on our way away from Amerika Mura, I passed by one shop selling women's size fedoras! Must go back. I am also interested in finding a bowler hat... To wear, yes. Yes.

- interesting dress shoes/boots, one or two worthwhile pairs (sadly the boots trend this year seems to really be following what is going on in the US... or maybe just continuing it). I think I have to go into Amerika Mura and peek around the more eccentric shops there.

- a few dresses or tunic-length pieces that can function as either stand-alone or as the base to a more accessorized outfit

I don't really have a mental image of what I'm looking for, like specific colors and whatnot ... I'm just hoping to find cool stuff that's under 90,000 yen ... Hah!

Just now I came back from the grocery store (there are three in the area, I always end up at Top World). Pearce! Pearce sent me a postcard from Australia, how nice! He refers to me as #18 and signs it "Y.T. - pc" Dear Pearce is in the middle of, or perhaps finished, reading Snow Crash and he is saying it's pretty damn good. Shit, I wouldn't mind rereading that book.

Jason! Maybe he's in South Korea by now. Someone in my own time zone! (Pearce is temporary, for work).

I'm in the middle of organizing the random bits in my quaint room. It feels lovely to have tatami mat underfoot. The place here really is nice. They provide a number of amenities for us students, such as toilet paper, sponges and soap for dishes, pots and pans and rice cookers, you name it.

Yesterday was Saturday and I went into Osaka for a 1 o' clock meeting with Julian (saiyajedi), who's been living in the area for about a year now. We met in Shinsaibashi, walked through Amerika Mura, Dotonburi, Nipponbashi, another one or two areas I forget the name (shame on me), and then ended up in Tennoji. In brief summaries, Shinsaibashi is fashionable and posh、with a number of big designer brands in fancy buildings. Amerika Mura is where there is a ton of youth culture hip-hop edgy whatever fashion flourishing. I saw several kids with crazy tattoos and beautiful track bikes locked against walls (the American Apparel is also in Amerika Mura - SO SO SO overpriced!). Dotonburi is something an endless and epically jam-packed road full of restaurants and more restaurants, open door, sit outside, huge crazy signs everywhere. Julian and I walked through the nerd quarter (hah!) after Dotonburi and I bought a memopad with a tachikoma on it (my only purchase after agonizing on which Dragonball towel to buy). He recounted his early adventures there and how he quickly learned to be wary of the harmless-looking shops full of cute little anime girls... After nerd/computer central, we walked through an older shoddier part of town on the way to Tennoji, which I found very interesting and similar to some sad stretches of American cities.

In Tennoji we met up with a new friend, Nori, and had coffee in the Muji cafe on top of some new shopping center called Abenobashi Natural Days, a place full of monotone, handcrafted, natural-looking products. Pricey! After kicking around for a bit, staring at the lights on skyscrapers, we made the move to go eat delicious okonomiyaki nearby. There was a spicy sauce there that was actually spicy! At okonomiyaki we met Nori's delightul friend Mika. Dinner carried on well, and our different personalities meshed well. SO WELL that we took some AMAZING print club pictures after. I really have to give it to Mika for thinking of "donut kings" and the lasers. Also, Julian's excellent sentai-style posing skills. Good times all around.

I got the trains home no problem, and then hung out with my roommates in Makino area (next train station over) for bit before retreating home, to my computer to read news until FOUR in the morning. Today I woke up at 1:47 looking seriously busted and tired. I bought some gum last night called Spunky Headz, which is black, chicklet-shaped, and tastes like super weird fresh hypermint (the kind you always buy, tigerbaxter). That's manly gum. Girly gum is tropical looking and comes in fresh flavor variations of grapefruit and peach.

Oh right, and Friday night I went to karaoke for the first time with some new buddies. At karaoke joints, there are room rates and then there are additional drinking rates. For two hours, pay 1000 yen (ten bucks), and get unlimited drinks (nomihokai - or is it houkai?). Then pay 600 yen for the room rate of 2 hours. This is per person. It's a pretty affordable way to have crazy fun getting excited with your crew and also kind of wasted. I drank four beers in this span of time and that is WAY too much for me! I was quite drunk. I walked home drunk with a bunch of other kids we ran into who were heading back to Hirakata. I peed in the river (steps leading down). I carried on, fairly quietly. Uhh, it was funny. Japanese beer is easy to drink ...

Pictures shall ensue.

In a bit, I workout, make dindin, and read up on Japanese particles.

Next Sunday I should meet up with this skatepunk niceguy Temple-grad kid from Philly, Nate, who got a job teaching English in Koshien, the city where the Hanshin Tigers play ball. Hopefully, we'll make a stop at Three Tides Tattoo, and I'll start to figure out what exactly I am going to get marked across my back.

PS: shikachou, if you send me 35 bucks (cost+shipping), I will mail you back the most glorious Tenshinhan t-shirt ever. Julian and I agree, you would die.

So. I'm taking a break from studying to talk about some stuff I've been realizing over the past few days. Maybe it's obvious that Japan is full of fashion-conscious and extremely stylish individuals. There are tons of magazines, stores, and specific & categorized styles of dress catered to every and any individual (generalization). Every sightseeing tour so far, of the local train stations (Hirakata and Makino), as well as my latest trip to Osaka, all seem to have the primary goal of shopping. With Kyoto, there were gorgeous temples and landscapes to see, but still, all along the way to these temples were loads of elegant, delightful shops.



Three days into being here, I realized I felt a slight pressure to dress fashionably, and "cute." After hanging around with a number of average Japanese college girls, I began to feel somewhat underdressed, in the sense that I was not "cute" enough. My nails were not done. I wasn't wearing any mascara. And I didn't have any feminine, drapey sort of shirt/skirt/dress ensemble on. It would be so easy for me to immediately switch my style to this. Even the cheapest of clothing stores sells any number of stylish pieces to instantly make a good outfit. Still, it's been my habit to only buy things I absolutely love, that I thought would appear unique and flattering, or at least felt representative of my personality. Sure, I could easily switch to a stylish, feminine, and more cute way of dress here, and I sort of want to try it out ... but it doesn't feel right. When I went to Osaka and to the shopping center next to Hep Five (the mall with the ferris wheel on top), I found three stores that catered to my weirdo-tomboy/weird-cute sense of style (Laundry, Candy Stripper, and another shop I forget ... Nene?). Pricey items, but well made. It gave me reassurance that indeed, not all young women in Japan dress in the crazy latest girly trends ... It's just that I seem to know mostly girly chicks right now. For the past three days, I've gone back to no-worries chucks, shorts, and t-shirts, with big earrings and a bandana or scarf thrown in for good measure. I painted my nails the usual chrome silver ... and have put on mascara a couple times. Heh.

The other day in downtown Hirakata, I asked my friend Sayoko why none of the Japanese seem to wear sunglasses when it's so freaking bright outside, and she said she wasn't sure why, but they mostly just didn't. When I showed her my silly 50s/80s fake Ray Bans from Urban Outfitters, she thought it was too cool and took a picture of me with them on. So in some funny way, I feel like I'm passing off a kind of "vintage American" style, which a bunch of the men's magazines have as a thing.




Current trends I'm noticing? Of all FREAKING things, UGG-style boots and PLAID! Fur-lined boots and suede-fringe boots are the craze right now, and none of them are made with cold weather in mind. Plaid, tartan, flannel is also hot, available for both sexes, in any and every form - dresses, drapey blouses, regular ole button-ups, whatever. Can you believe it? Silly Philadelphia hipster/college style is IN here in Osaka. Also, messenger bags in the style of the smaller REload jawns are kicking around, waterproof and all - just no elaborate flap designs. Some fun things I kind of want to buy are leggings made out of a denim-like fabric, some even with front and back pockets (just like regular jeans). The point is to roll them up haphazardly underneath a tunic-length top or dress. They come in dark and light blue denim colors, and crazy shit like neon green, pink, and purple leopard print. The 14-year-old in me REALLY wants a pair of the neon green leopard print jawns ...

I have to be careful here. I have to budget. But ohhh, the clothes here are intense.



Also, can anyone tell me if they're selling these glow-in-the-dark/reflective zebra stripe chucks anywhere in the states? I WANT.

Thoughts for later: If after only a few days being here, I felt the pressure to adhere to a certain style of dress & expected cuteness, how do girls who are born and raised in Japan feel??? Also, the gal/super sexy/light brown hair/short-shorts long legs image is fascinating ...